the terrible turkish executioner (1904)

By Georges Méliès.

Melies - The terrible turkish executione
by kinetoscope

(h/t Voyages Extraodinaires).

rachid taha

I love this song by the French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha. The video is pretty funny as well. The lyrics can be found here.



He also does a version of "Rock the Casbah" in Arabic!

viva barney

belgian pulpits

O lazy August! When I should be preparing for my fall classes, or comparing microfilms of manuscripts for my research job, or even blogging out my bile towards the politics of the day, I find myself drooping in the heat and hearing the sweet siren call of the sofa, cat & nap. Yet there are things that I have yet to confess to blogdom - such as the fact that I had a surprise trip to Belgium two weeks ago. The reason why I shall leave to another day: I will just say that it involved a cat, a crisis, and a happy resolution. I took a number of photos when I was there, but today I want to share just one category -- beautiful wood and marble Baroque pulpits that seem to have been installed in every church that was around in the seventeenth century. I have no idea why there was a fancy-pulpit-carving craze in the Low Countries in this period, but I suspect it has something to do with preaching, the Counter-reformation and the fact that Belgium was right on the frontier between Protestant and Catholic Europe. Anyway, beautiful stuff and here are my photos.

oh no!

He wasn't really born in the United States! He isn't a legitimate medievalist! Where's the long form, Liam?



Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator (h/t TPM).

new post on frammenti e rovine

Dies Irae at the Elmore Ranch.